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Three Early Railroad Equipment Contracts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

George S. Gibb
George S. Gibb
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University.
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Extract

The use of highly specialized techniques for financing equipment on railroads in the United States became common soon after the Civil War. Comparatively little is known, however, of their origins and early evolution. Much of the published information on early railroad equipment financing is concerned with federal, State, and municipal government aids to the new railroads. Because public financing was a matter of public record, that story has been preserved in considerable detail. Unfortunately this has not been the case with private financing. The lack of specific data in this field has obscured important historical precedents for the equipment trust and conditional sale agreements, which were to become so important in the later decades of the 19th century. It is particularly interesting, therefore, to examine some original and hitherto unpublished manuscript material which presents examples of railroad equipment financing as early as 1838.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , February 1947 , pp. 10 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1947

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References

1 Made available to the School through the kindness of Mr. L. D. Waldron, Treasurer, and Mr. Arthur T. Safford, Chief Engineer, of the Locks and Canals Company.

2 “Letter front the Secretary of the Treasury in Relation to Steam Engines” reported in the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, no. 6 (1923), pp. 22–33Google Scholar.

3 Directors' Records, Locks and Canals Company. Unless otherwise indicated, all material in this article is taken from the directors' records and correspondence of the Locks and Canals Company, Lowell, Massachusetts.

4 Cowley, Charles, History of Lowell (Boston, 1868), p. 77Google Scholar.

5 It should be noted that the specialized techniques outlined in the following paragraphs arose out of special weaknesses of particular railroad customers, and were not universally applied to all customers. Both before and after 1837, business with the stronger roads (mainly in New England) was conducted on a “cash and carry” basis.